After a rather long period of instability, where my home internet provider insisted on messing up with my connectivity, i was forced to relocate some of the stuff i had on my home server to a more professional solution. I've rented a Xen based VPS from an (apparently) small enterprise, which was able to captivate me by their competitive prices and professional, in a rather bofh way, image. Hopefully i'll be keeping a good impression of them in the future too.

Finally i made some small changes in the script i use to create the ACDrive voice index files, on the external mp3 drive i use in my car stereo, making it less dangerous to use. Don't get me wrong, i did it for my own security. I'd hate to loose my mp3s .
Anyway, if you happen to use the linux phatdb utility to maintain your media db files up to date, you might want to give the phatdb-voiceidx.sh script a try. Right now it only creates the TTS files for the default expressions, such as “now browsing genre”, and the folders names. That's actually the only kind of navigation i use, but i didn't put aside the possibility to extend support to the other voice files. Maybe when i find some time.

I finally got the time (€) to replace the two disks (400GB ATA + 320GB SATA) i had running in standalone mode with two brand new Samsung Spinpoint sata drives, with 1TB capacity each. Migration to the new disks in mirror mode (RAID1) went smoothly and i can now a be a little less worried about loosing all my info, or having the system unavailable.
I also took the chance to include some real time statistics here.

Changed the default behaviour for the greeting delay patch for Qmail. It's actually a fix, since i originally intended to have a default delay of zero seconds if GREETDELAY was specified but no value was given. The previous versions used a delay of 1 second if no value was specified.
Thanks to Joerg Backschues for pointing that out to me.